


We Built This City (On Rock and Roll)

by Aja



Series: Author's faves [15]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Limbo, M/M, New York New York, a hell of a town, limbo's where the party's at, robert needs a hug, the Chrysler's up but the Gehry is down!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 04:53:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5653132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Party in Limbo and everyone's invited!</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Built This City (On Rock and Roll)

**Author's Note:**

> This is the very first thing I ever started writing for this fandom, way back in August 2010. It is finally finished!! I'm pretty chuffed that no one ever (afaik) snapped up this title in the meantime. :D

The first thing Ariadne says is, "Don't look at me, I didn't do it," as she's wringing her clothes free of salt water for the second time that day.

Yusuf squints against the sun. "What happened?" he says. "Where are we?" He turns around and gets a glimpse of the city blocks crumbling in the distance. "We're not—this isn't—"

"FUCK YEAH, LIMBO!" yells Eames into the expanse of white sand that surrounds them. It echoes alarmingly, and Eames lets out an exaggerated whoop and kicks the sand. It's probably not possible to fist pump sardonically, but Eames comes close.

"Uh, guys?" says Robert, still blinking. "Where are we?" He looks around. "Where's Uncle Peter? He was just here."

"Seriously?" says Ariadne. "No one thought to make sure we could actually escape from the van?"

"Well, it's not like the kind of thing you can just _practice_ , is it?" says Yusuf. "And just who made a river too deep to swim out of?"

" _Someone_ had the idea to crash a van off a fifty-foot drop," Ariadne replies. "The river had to be deep enough to keep us from hitting the bottom."

"Did I just have a bag over my head?" asks Robert.

"Oh, and whose great idea was that, let's put bags over the victims' heads so they can't see what's happening, that'll work great for later on, when they're trying not to _drown_ ," says Eames.

"You're right," says Yusuf. "What a ridiculous plan."

"Why are you in Uncle Peter's clothes?" says Robert.

"Oh, god," says Yusuf. "This is real. I mean. Really not real."

Arthur sighs. He dusts off his suit. and looks around. Far beyond the empty city, a solitary mountain sits alone on the landscape. It’s high and snowcapped, and a frigid mist encircles the peak. The beach stretches endlessly in both directions. There's a faint crackling in the distance as another city block collapses. 

"Cobb's out there somewhere," he says. "We need to find him."

 

 

"Wait, so—you guys were working _with_ the kidnappers?" says Robert. He's wrung out his tie and taken off his jacket, and now he's drying his toes over the fire Ariadne dreamed up for them all. (Eames voted she dream up a Tropical Hilton instead, but Arthur insisted that they examine the dreamscape more and follow proper zoning protocol before they started erecting anything too solid. 

He disregarded Eames’ rejoinder, "That's what she said.")

Eames puts his arm over Robert's shoulder, ignoring Arthur's eyeroll, and says in his most comforting voice, "Not exactly, mate. We _are_ the kidnappers." 

"You kidnapped me to help me break into Uncle Peter's dream?"

"No, I was pretending to be your Uncle Peter."

"Well, why do _you_ want to kidnap me?"

"I don't!"

"But you said you were Uncle Peter, and he hired the kidnappers."

"Saito hired the kidnappers," Arthur breaks in testily.

"Who?"

"Saito," says Eames, gesturing broadly, as if a vague hand-waggle can contain all that Saito is or could be. "Sexy, Japanese, owns everything. Probably Yakuza."

"Oh," says Robert. "Are we in a movie?"

"No, says Yusuf. "Limbo. For decades."

"Brilliant," says Eames. "I don't know about the rest of you, but I plan to spend that time having as much drunken sex on the beach as I possibly can."

"Is _that_ why you kidnapped me?" says Robert, shocked.

"We were working for Saito to implant the idea in your head to break up your father's company before you became a new world power," says Arthur.

"Well, don't _spoil_ the lad," says Eames. "You could've at least let him have some build-up."

"I thought you guys were my friends," says Robert. "I thought you were cool." He looks down at the ground and kicks the sand a little.

"We _are_ your friends, sweetheart," says Eames, scooting closer to him.

"Dude!" says Robert. "You're not my friend! You stole my wallet! And you turned into a girl and didn't even leave me your real phone number! And you stole my wallet _again_! You stole my wallet, like, three times!"

"Well, you were sort of a bum date, nothing personal," says Eames.

"Are you going to turn into a girl again?"

"Of course not. Now all I want is to be friends."

"Stop lying to him," Arthur snaps.

"It's not lying," Eames says, dreaming a pint of Newcastle into his hand. "Once we wake up, our only hope of not getting arrested for all eternity is to become our dear Robert's best friends in all the world."

"I don't know if I want to be friends with you guys anymore," Robert says, resting his chin in his hands.

"No hard feelings, though, right?" Eames offers the first sip of beer to Robert, who waves it sullenly away.

"No!" Robert says. "I totally have hard feelings. Very hard feelings!"

"You'll come round in no time," say Eames. He pats Robert's shoulder and takes a swig.

"Once we wake up," says Arthur, "We won't even remember what real life is like anymore. You know what happened to Mal."

"That's not necessarily how it has to be," says Yusuf from the other side of the fire. He's dreamed up a kiln and has been glass-blowing for the last half hour. Currently he's twirling a string of molten glass over the fire like a pro. It's quite impressive. "Cobb and his wife only had the two of themselves, right? But there are five of us."

"Seven," says Arthur. "Cobb's out there somewhere. Looking for Saito."

"Right," says Yusf, tone implying that Arthur's point isn't necessarily adding to his own. "But five—seven—people sharing the same dream stand a much better chance of holding on to reality than two people do."

"Yeah," says Arthur. "But for how long?"

Yusuf thins his lips and doesn't answer.

"You know," Eames says, smiling wryly when Arthur looks up, "Yusuf's right. Five people have a much better chance of staying aware that we're in a dream. We have a better chance of collectively elevating our sense of what's real and what isn't."

"Exactly," says Yusuf. "We just have to make sure that we don't build anything too mundane—that whatever we build in limbo is so outlandish, so bizarre and over-the-top that it can never be mistaken for real life."

"Hey, you guys," says Ariadne from behind them. They turn.

"Um," she says. "I built Graceland?"

 

 

"Dude!" says Robert, squeezing past the line of projections with cameras and fanny packs. Ariadne's been letting him help with the Jungle Room tour, but Eames and Yusuf are duetting "Heart and Soul" on the King's piano, and Robert totally can't miss that action. Eames plays one-handed, but Yusuf's really getting into it. Robert nudges Eames aside and takes over the treble.

"Where are all the projections going once they're done with the tour?" Eames asks, folding his arms and leaning against a stained-glass peacock window.

"Oh, Arthur's handling all that," Robert says. "He said something about putting in a luxury hotel."

"Oh, god," says Eames. "Leave this sort of thing up to Arthur and we'll have toast for neurons before you can say 'city planning.'"

He finds Arthur raising half a city block of meticulously plotted foundations. "Never seen you do architecture," he says, elbowing him in the side. Arthur goes rigid and steps away from him.

"I know enough to get by," he says. "Just like you."

"Oh, I know more than enough," Eames answers. "But down here none of that matters anyway, right?"

"Do you not realize how fucked we are down here?" Arthur says, his voice going clipped and dark with anger. 

Eames puts his hands up. "We're stuck in limbo for decades and our only way of maintaining sanity when we wake up is to dream up a world too fantastical to ever mistake for reality."

"You _say_ that, but we don't know what could happen. The more unrealistic we make things down here, the more we could forget what reality feels like. For all we know, that could destroy us when we finally wake up."

"You can't think like that, Arthur." Eames puts his hand on Arthur's shoulder. "You'll go crazy down here before the year's even out."

Arthur says, "There's more to it than that. If we make things _too_ unrealistic, the projections will wise up and tear us apart."

"So? If they do, we’ll just wake up again down here anyway, right? Besides, we don't even know whose projections they _are_."

"Everyone's. We're in a shared space down here. We're all subjects."

"Well," Eames says, "in that case, what's to keep you from assuming I'm just a projection?"

Arthur's lips quirk at that, quick as a flash. "My projections would be a lot nicer than you," he says.

Eames looks at him. "I'm always nice to you," he says.

Arthur sniffs.

"But you really should stand aside and let me take care of this," Eames adds, and with a wave of his hand, he razes all Arthur's hard work to the ground, and conjures up a giant goldfish bowl in its place. "It's got everything!" Indeed, it does, hotel rooms sprouting in ledges all around the curve of the glass dome, one sleek elevator rising in the center. A few more moments, and every floor is replete with ice makers and vending machines, and the concierge stands in the center behind a giant coral reef desk.

"There!" he says. "They can sleep in there!"

"It's a terrarium, Eames," Arthur says. "They're projections, not turtles."

"Oh, hey," says a projection passing by with a mickey mouse camera in hand. "Is that open?"

"Sure!" Eames says, grinning. "Go right on in!"

Arthur rolls his eyes.

 

 

"I don't like this," says Arthur, glaring at Eames from the doorway of his new bedroom (Eames has painted one wall bright yellow and another wall bright blue, and there's a My Little Pony playset in the center of the room). After a few days of hosting tours at Graceland, they projected actual caretakers, who promptly kicked them all off the grounds for squatting. As a more permanent residence, Ariadne built them a funhouse across the street from the giant fishbowl, complete with giant beds and crazy mirrors. One of them is hanging on the ceiling above Eames' bed. He's lying on top of the covers with his legs crossed. On the ceiling they stretch for miles.

He yawns. "And what exactly do you mean by 'this'?"

Arthur waves at the air. "Everything. The building we're doing, the fantasy, the whole thing."

"Look, you're the one who wanted to make sure the projections didn't converge on us all in a mad frenzy. Best way to do that is to keep building things."

"I saw my tenth-grade homeroom teacher buying coffee at Ariadne's cafe," Arthur says. He frowns. "I don't want to be stuck here with Mr. Platt for the next fifty years."

Eames grins at him, a slow, devious smirk that only travels up one side of his mouth. "Why don't you devise an ingenious, karmically fitting way to get rid of him, then? What'd he teach? Science? English? Too bad he didn't teach music, you could drop a piano on him."

"See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You're already halfway to losing your mind."

Eames' grin makes it to the other half of his face. "You and I are going to have such fun down here," he says.

"No," says Arthur. "No fun. And no killing projections."

"Not even the one who looks like Charlton Heston? Which is totally your subconscious manifesting its self-loathing hero complex, by the way."

Arthur glares harder. "No. No killing projections, and no more building. Enough building."

Ariadne comes up behind him and sneaks her arm around his waist. "Aww, Arthur," she says, cuddling. "You don't want to see my awesome Gothic cathedral? With mirrored hallways?"

"Well, okay," says Arthur. "Maybe."

 

 

"You can't put a bar there, Eames, you'll drive off all our customers."

"Since when has the human need for alcohol remotely obstructed the human need for coffee?" Eames' dive bar is rickety and leaning, cosied right up against the neat prim walls of Arthur's coffeehouse. "If anything, they'll all be lined up outside your doors the next morning." He spreads his arms. "It's a perfect arrangement!"

Arthur folds his. "No, it's really not."

 

 

"We need to brainstorm," says Ariadne. "The things we're building are too mundane. If we want to make the difference between fantasy and reality really stick, we have to make sure everything we design down here is just that much different."

"So things are just slightly off?" Eames asks. "Chocolate milk in the shower, pink coffee beans, that sort of thing?"

Yusuf nods. "The longer we stay down here, the more our minds grow accustomed to thinking of this place as our reality. We have to utilize discipline, and rigorous training, to learn to think, and create, in ways that help us distinguish which is which."

"We're going to start holding bi-weekly brainstorming sessions to work on ways to create fantastic elements into the world design. Everyone has to come." Ariadne hands out packets. "Also, there's this." Robert opens his and starts reading.

Eames reads, "'Personal and Group Rules for Limbo: a Survivor's Guide.' Oh my god, Ariadne, look at you, you're a regular Hermione."

"Shut up, Eames," says Arthur.

"This is really cool, Ariadne," says Robert. "When do you want us to turn them back in?"

"You don't turn them in," Ariadne says. "There are two sets of rules. One is for your own personal use, but you should probably share it with at least one other person. That way someone else will know what your personal discipline is, and they can help you follow it."

Yusuf adds, "The rules are about helping each of us maintain our sanity, helping us remember the boundaries between real life and fantasy while we're here. You each have personal rules as well as group rules. As a group, we all agree to abide by each person's group requests."

Eames snorts. Arthur kicks his chair but doesn't look up.

"So we all agree to abide by our own rules, public and personal," Eames says. "And that's supposed to help us maintain our grasp on reality _how_ , exactly?"

"Well," Robert says, with a devilish little smile. "For one thing, if you break the rules down here, we can kill you as many times as we want, right?"

"No one is killing anyone," says Arthur, still without looking up. “For all we know there could be another lower level beyond this one and we’d all wind up there alone and separated, forever.”

Eames’ smile is brittle. "As always, pet, you are a bringer of light and good cheer.”

 

 

When they wake up the next morning, there’s a dark cloud hanging over the mountain in the distance. Enormous thunderclaps jolt them and impossibly long bolts of lightning streak across the sky.

"Well," says Eames. "Who's responsible for that bit of cheer?"

"It's Cobb," Arthur says grimly after a moment when no one answers. 

"You're saying he's out there, trapped in a hurricane on top of a blizzard?"

Arthur's lips twist. "He always did have to make things as difficult as possible."

"That mountain could be a hundred miles away," says Yusuf. "We'd have to dream up an entire climbing expedition, and even then there's no way of knowing where he'd be."

"We could take a plane and do a fly-over," says Arthur.

"You won't let me build a bar next to your little cafe, but you'll build a jet to go off and look for Cobb?"

"He's right," says Ariadne. "If you go, you shouldn't go alone."

"That wasn't actually the point I was making," says Eames.

"I could take explosives and detonate them around the mountain to let Cobb know he's not alone," says Arthur. "Then we can camp out and use smoke signals to let him know our location. In a few days he should be able to find us."

"God, haven't you people blown enough things up?" says Robert. 

Arthur sulks.

 

 

**Robert's Group Rules For Surviving Limbo:**

1) no more turning into women  
2) no more turning into my acquaintances  
3) no blowing things up  
4) please stop touching me inappropriately, Eames

 

**Arthur's Group Rules For Surviving Limbo:**

1) No killing projections  
2) Eames doesn't get to build things  
3) No more dive bars  
4) stop touching me inappropriately, Eames

 

**Ariadne's Group Rules For Surviving Limbo:**

1) I get to build whatever I want, as long as it's not a dive bar for Eames.  
2) EVERYONE has to attend brainstorming sessions and help brainstorm.  
2a) Or else I'm not building Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

"Hey!" says Eames happily. "There's no number four on here." 

Arthur scowls. Ariadne grins.

 

 

 

Saito rolls up in a limousine just outside of day three.

"Where's Cobb?" Arthur demands.

"How should I know? I've been building startups and then buying them out," Saito says.

"You—!" says Robert. "You are not allowed to stay. He can't stay, can he?"

"Employer," says Eames apologetically.

"True," Saito says. 

"Is there anyone here who hasn't tried to kidnap me, shoot me, or rob me?" Robert asks wearily.

Tentatively, Ariadne raises her hand.

Robert stares at her. "You dropkicked me out a window."

"Oh," says Ariadne. "Oh, that's right. Sorry?"

"Ugh, you _guys_ ," Robert says.

Saito appraises Robert. "And what have _you_ been doing all this time?"

"I learned to make margaritas," Robert says defensively.

"And ski!" Eames adds. "He's gotten very good!"

"No, he hasn't," Arthur snaps.

"Shut up, Arthur," says Eames.

"Guys, guys, I made Wall Street!" Ariadne says.

"Oh?" says Saito, perking up. "Can you make the Tokyo Stock Exchange?"

 

 

 

"I hate these things," Arthur says, tapping his pencil fiercely against his moleskine. Ariadne has built them a special meeting room for what she calls their mission critical. It looks a lot like Tarkovsky’s space station in _Solaris_ , and Arthur pointedly refrains from looking out the bubble windows to see what she’s put on the outside.

"It's because you're threatened by any scenario where you have to come up with creative ideas," says Eames. He pronounces 'scenario' to rhyme with 'barrio.' It makes Arthur terribly unhappy.

"That's not true," Arthur says, hoping Eames understands how upsetting Arthur finds his general existence. "I came up with pink elephants last week. It's not my fault Ariadne didn't want to design a jungle."

"I don't call stealing your ideas from children's films necessarily thinking outside the box," says Eames. Arthur frowns. "But I will say you've more imagination than I've given you credit for." He smiles when Arthur looks up.

"We're already running out of things to build, though," says Robert.

"We could just stop building anything at all," says Arthur.

"No," says Saito. "You will stagnate. You will become used to what is around you. You'll stop finding reasons to create things that are new. That's how it starts."

"He's right," says Yusuf. "I've seen it happen enough times with clients. We need to keep finding ways to manipulate what's around us, ways to unsettle ourselves just enough so we always have a reminder of what is and isn't real."

"Isn't that what the totems are for?" says Robert.

"Can you remember the last time you checked yours?" Saito asks.

Robert starts to answer, then hesitates. His expression shadows.

“No,” says Arthur. “No, I don’t like this. If we get used to reality, we go mad and die. But if we _don’t_ start thinking of it as reality, then all our projections could start trying to wake us up by murdering us. And we don’t know what happens if any of us dies down here.”

There’s a murmur of concern from the others. “I did see a couple of projections at Eames’ dive bar giving him the fisheye the other day,” Ariadne said. 

Eames flashes her a grin. “Oh, that’s just Arthur’s subconscious manifesting his undying lust for me.” 

“If Arthur’s right, though,” Yusuf says, “Then as our collective understanding that this world isn’t reality solidifies, we increase the chances that our projections will start agitating harder to wake us up.”

“They will constitute an army, completely outnumber us,” Saito says gravely.

"He’s right,” Eames says. “This isn't sustainable—we need to do more, we need to give ourselves some sort of failsafe mechanism."

"Okay, look," says Ariadne. "We have a couple of things going for us that Cobb and Mal didn't have when they were down here. The main thing is that we know exactly how much time we have on the surface. Collectively, we all know we're on a plane, right?” They nod. 

“And we know every minute in reality is multiplied by the time dilation factor of Yusuf’s Somnacin for every level, so if we assume that holds true for Limbo as the fourth level—”

“Then you have 20 to the 4th power, or 160,000 minutes down here for every one minute up there,” Eames interjects. 

Arthur breaks his pencil in half. Eames shoots him a wink.

“It’s been five days down here, so that’s 7,200 minutes...” Ariadne scribbles the math on her notebook, then looks up, aghast.

“Three seconds,” she says. “Only 2.7 seconds have passed in reality since we went into Limbo.”

A shocked silence follows this speech. After another moment, Saito says lightly, “The flight so far has lasted about thirty minutes, correct? We have been under for about ten of those. Assuming we can kick ourselves awake when Yusuf’s drug wears off—”

“The drug should wear off half an hour or so before the flight lands,” says Yusuf. “And, well, Robert is sedated a little more heavily than everyone else, of course.”

Robert shoots him a glare. “So I’m going to be down here for a zillion years by myself? After being down here for several zillion more years with a band of—of dream assassins?”

“That’s such a negative way of putting it,” Eames hedges.

“So we have about nine hours of real-time sedation left,” Saito says, looking between Yusuf and Ariadne.

“Right,” Ariadne says, biting her lip. She does the math, her face getting paler with every calculation, until finally she says, voice nearly a whisper: “That’s 60 thousand days, or... 164 years.”

This time the silence is unsettling. They stare around the room at each other. 

“So we’re fucked,” says Robert. “I guess I don’t have to worry about taking over dad’s shitty company now.”

“Not necessarily,” says Eames. “We're creating the dreamscape, right? If we can alter the known physical universe, we should be able to alter the concept of time down here.”

“You mean we can change the way we experience time,” Yusuf says, “and get back to the surface faster."

"You mean like a kind of collective group inception upon ourselves?" asks Ariadne. "We could try it, but how would we all agree on what the new time dilation rate should be?”

“You'd need to have the idea permeate the dreamscape at every level,” Yusuf answers. ”It's not enough just to convince ourselves that time is moving slower. We have to trick our collective subconscious into believing it, too."

“But we all know, subconsciously, that we’re on a plane,” Arthur says. “So if we know that, it should be easy to convince our subconscious to believe what it knows is the truth, right?"

"Exactly,” says Eames. “We just need everything in the world we create to reinforce the new idea." 

“How the fuck are we supposed to do that?” Arthur scowls.

Eames pulls out his pocket watch and gives it a twirl. “How else do we do it in reality?” he says. “Watches. We'll need to make watches. And calendars. And make sure that every clock we design from here on out follows the new math, so to speak." 

"I can help there," says Yusuf. "If Ariadne can calculate the new time, I'll build the clocks. I know a little bit about watchmaking—not a lot but enough to get us by. It'll take me a few days to get the parts to function, but I can make it work."

“Excellent!” Eames beams. “The rest of us can start trying to slow the sun’s orbital path in the sky.”

“How will we know how much to slow it by?” Robert asks. Eames shrugs.

“Who cares? Let’s just let it hang where it is for now and then we can pick it up again when we’ve synchronized our watches.”

Robert frowns. After a few moments he excuses himself from the meeting, and after another few moments, Eames finds a reason to saunter out after him. Arthur doesn’t watch him go, but when Ariadne adjourns them in order to confer with Yusuf, he makes a beeline for the dock Eames helped Robert build the other day. 

He finds the two of them sitting on the end, crude fishing poles in their hands and entirely implausible freshwater bass and trout jumping out of the saltwater waves all around them. 

“It’s just gonna suck for my mom and my grandmom and my sister,” Robert is saying glumly. “Me getting off the plane and I’m suddenly a vegetable and all. Or, like, all weird and non-functional for the funeral or whatever. And I probably won’t even get to say goodbye to my dad.”

“Now, now, none of that,” Eames says, patting him on the back. “You’re stranded in a marvelous place with some of the most brilliant minds on the planet. We’ll figure a way out of here long before you have to worry about that.” Arthur watches him expertly reel in a mammoth catfish, then casually toss it back out into the ocean. Arthur hates him a lot. 

“You said Cobb couldn’t find his way out,” Robert says. Everything he says sounds like a pout, Arthur thinks, wondering if it’s an affectation, an expression of how much Robert hates it here, or if he really just sounds like that all the time. 

“Ehhhh,” says Eames. “I don’t know that I’d put Cobb in the same category as everyone else.”

“I liked him,” says Robert. “He was nice to me.”

“He _drugged_ you,” Eames says, staring.

Robert shrugs. “I mean, yeah, but he has a really trustworthy face. And, like, dad suits? I dunno, he just seems like someone you can depend on.”

“ _Americans_ ,” Eames says under his breath.

“Hey,” Arthur says, coming up behind them. “Sorry to interrupt your little _tête-à-tête_ , but I need to talk to Eames.”

“There’s a first,” Eames says, raising an eyebrow at him. Arthur casually toes their tackle box into the water.

“Hey!” Robert says, glaring. “I haven’t even caught anything yet.”

Arthur laughs, a little meanly. “Are you sure?” He narrows his eyes at Eames. Eames eyerolls and sticks his tongue out at Arthur, but gets to his feet, cheerily dusting off his pants and giving Robert a final pat on the back. 

Arthur leads Eames away to what he’s started to think of as his private part of the limboscape so far—the airplane hangar he’s designed behind the funhouse. He’s made it just big enough to house a small biplane and a helicopter, but that’s all he needs. He shuts the door behind them and lets the aura of stainless steel settle around him for a moment—and then Eames is shoving him a little roughly up against the corrugated wall.

"What's your problem with Fischer?” says Eames. "We've put the poor bastard through hell, he needs to have someone care about him after all this."

"So it's just about the job?" Arthur asks. Then he swallows and looks away.

Eames stares at him, a long, hard look.

"I mean it doesn't matter to me one way or the other," says Arthur, straightening and flattening his back against the wall. "I don't care what you do, really, I—I—" He cuts short when Eames leans in and crowds him. He takes a deep breath. "Don't do this," he says.

Eames says, "Don't do what?" with his eyes fixed to Arthur's mouth.

"Don't fuck with me," Arthur says. "Not down here."

Eames raises his eyes and cups Arthur’s chin in his large palm in a way Arthur finds entirely unbearable. "My dearest of all Arthurs," he says, thumbing Arthur's jawline. "I'm head over heels for you."

"You—you're not even _nice_ to me," Arthur says helplessly.

"None of that," says Eames. He leans in. Arthur turns his head.

"Eames," says Arthur. “I can’t.”

"Oh, but you absolutely can," says Eames. “I give you permission. In fact I give you permission to give yourself permission every day for the next hundred years or so, after which we can revisit our decision to see if it was a good call.”

"No, I mean—I'm using this as my totem," says Arthur. 

Eames straightens and stares at him. “This,” he repeats.

Arthur swallows. “You and me,” he says, flushing. "If nothing happens til we wake up, then when it finally does, I'll know I'm not dreaming."

Eames splutters. "That doesn't even make sense," he says. 

"Look, just—no starting anything til we wake up," says Arthur.

"Arthur,” Eames says. “We don’t even know if the time dilation factor of 20 holds true for Limbo. We could be down here for a million years.”

“Megaannus,” says Arthur.

“Come again?”

“It’s the word for a million years,” Arthur says.

“How appropriate,” Eames says. “You are mega-anus-blocking yourself. Realistically, we’re all going to wind up having sex with everyone else and all each others’ projections.”

“No way,” says Arthur, scowling. “Cheat on me and I’ll kill you myself.”

“Sorry?” says Eames. “I can’t cheat on our _hypothetical not-yet-existent relationship that you won’t let us consummate_?” 

Arthur folds his arms. Eames’ skeptical look crumples into a look of unbridled affection that makes Arthur’s heart hurt, and when Eames leans in again and presses his lips to Arthur’s forehead, Arthur allows it. 

“Arthur, light of my life,” says Eames into his hair. “Somewhere, there's another limbo where we're stuck having shamelessly dirty sex every day for the next one hundred and sixty years."

“Believe me,” says Arthur a little glumly, “I’m aware.” 

"Couldn't you at least reverse it?" says Eames. "Say you'll know it's reality when we finally _stop_ having sex?"

"That wouldn’t be much of a motivator for you to get us out of this hellhole faster," says Arthur.

Eames makes a face.

"But don't think I didn't consider it," says Arthur.

Eames sighs. “Well,” he says, looking a bit grim, “Never let it be said you didn’t like a good challenge.”

Arthur frowns. “Look,” he says. "Up there we’re not even sure whether we even like each other."

Eames fixes him with a strange smile. “Is that really what you tell yourself when we’re awake?”

“All I'm saying is that you’re—this—is an indulgence we can’t afford if we want to get out of here with our brains intact, Eames.”

“You’re afraid we’ll become like Cobb and Mal, aren’t you,” Eames says, eyes narrowing. “So wrapped up in each other that we lose everything else. But _we’re not them._ ”

“You don’t know that,” Arthur snaps. “None of us know what it’s like down here.”

“Yes, but I know _you_ , Eames says, “and I know us. You don't get it, Arthur. I'm already on the hook—I feel exactly the way about you up there as I do down here. You can’t tell me you love me and then ask me to wait for you in the same breath, not when we don’t know whether we’ll even make it out of here. I can't do that. I promise to do everything in my power not to let you become my whole world, and vice versa—but I won't be your bloody totem."

"No,” says Arthur, helplessly, “ _You_ don't get it. You already _are_. You’re—" He stops. “I can’t trust anything else here,” he says. “But I trust you. I _know_ you.”

He takes a deep breath. Eames looks shaken, rooted to the spot with barely an inch of space between them. “I know if—when—you tell me it’s reality, I’ll believe you. But I can’t risk getting confused and taking you with me.”

Eames rubs his palm in soothing circles over Arthur’s back. “You always carry the weight of the world on your shoulders,” he says. “You don’t have to this time, Arthur. We’re getting out of here. I promise.”

“I believe you,” says Arthur, smiling wryly. “And that’s why I can’t get distracted by having century-long sex with you.”

“But you do want to, yes?” Eames says. “We’re agreed on that part, right?”

“Well,” says Arthur. “I’m not exactly sure having a nine-hour erection on an airplane is the way to go.”

“Say no more, you have me convinced,” says Eames, stepping back hastily with a final pat to Arthur’s lapels. “So what do we do in the meantime when we’re not having all that sex?”

“We look for Cobb,” Arthur says.

“And there goes that nine-hour erection,” says Eames.

"Even if we do manage to work a new time dilation into this dreamscape,” says Arthur, “Cobb won’t be a part of it. Out there somewhere, wherever he is, he's lost in his own time continuum."

“And that’s... bad,” Eames says. Arthur glowers at him. “Arthur, he just left you to drop into limbo without even trusting you enough to tell you how he was planning to screw you over.”

“We all knew this job would be risky,” Arthur says. 

“Ariadne and Saito?” Eames says. “Yusuf who never goes into the field & had no idea what a militarized subconscious would be like? The mark who never asked for any of this? It would have been one thing if he’d done this to an experienced team, but Cobb’s essentially murdered all four of them. And betrayed the only person who has been by his side for the last two years.”

“He wouldn't have done it if he'd known about Fischer’s trained projections,” Arthur answers. “He thought the risk was low. That's how he convinced Yusuf.” He knows Eames hears the guilt straining his voice. 

“Arthur,” Eames says gently, “You can't know that. This isn't your fault.”

“It's my error that got Saito shot and fucked our whole timeline and sent us to Limbo,” Arthur says. “I'm not letting any of you get lost down here, and that includes Cobb.”

“So be it.” Eames drags out the phrase on a long sigh, then produces a pack of Chesterfields and a lighter from literal thin air. Arthur watches the movement of his hands, the way his cheeks hollow as he lights one up, and doesn't think about how long a hundred and sixty-four years is.

"When we find Cobb, it's likely his reality will conflict with ours,” he says instead. “His timeframe could be so different we may not even seem real to him."

"Only one thing to do in that case,” Eames says, drawing out a puff of smoke on a long, slow exhale. Arthur has to remind himself the movement only looks as glamorous as it does because this is Eames’ subconscious projection of what he thinks he looks like when smoking. Or possibly it’s Arthur’s. _Fuck._

“What’s that?” Arthur says.

Eames tosses him a wry smile. “Find him fast.”

 

 

**Arthur's Personal Rules for Surviving Limbo:**

1\. Don't fall in love.

 

 

“Since when do you know how to fly a helicopter?” Eames asks as they strap in.

“Odd, isn’t it? The things one learns in the Air Force, Mr. Eames.” 

Eames leers at him. Arthur rolls his eyes and lifts off. 

Cobb’s had enough of a head start in Limbo that he’s been here long enough to leave the deserted city—less deserted now that they’ve added all their projections and fun new buildings—travel into the desert, and erect a decent-sized mountain, presumably powered by his guilt and isolation. 

Ariadne’s convinced Cobb exorcised his projection of Mal, so they don’t have to worry about that, at least; but Arthur’s not convinced everything’s kosher. There’s something strange about this mountain, he thinks as he flies in slow circles below the cloud cover. It’s not just that it’s totally deserted; after all, limbo isn’t exactly teeming with wildlife. It’s that it’s somehow off. The mountain itself is just... wrong, in a way that Arthur can’t put his finger on.

After the third time they’ve carefully circled the mountain, Eames points to an odd cliff and says, “What’s that down there?” Arthur whirrs in as close as he can get without re-enacting the helicopter scene from _Rambo: First Blood_. 

“Looks like there’s some kind of writing carved into the side of the mountain,” Eames says.

“What, like fucking Roanoke?” Arthur snaps. Eames shakes his head.

“No, sorry, it’s an arrow.” Eames frowns. Arthur leans over and sees a crudely fashioned arrow pointing to a tree at the edge of the cliff.

“Cobb probably hid something in the tree,” Eames says. He’s already reaching for the bungee gear.

“You can’t just rappel down there like you’re John McClane,” Arthur protests, but Eames only responds, “Nonsense, I’m halfway there,” and leaves Arthur to grip the wheel with both hands and very much ignore the way Eames looks like a James Bond fantasy as he swings off the side of the copter onto the ledge.

 

 

“So he killed himself?” Yusuf asks a few hours later after they’ve brought the message back to mission critical.

“I don’t think so,” Eames says. They’ve been puzzling over the note since he retrieved it from the knothole in the tree on the cliffside, but he and Arthur are no closer to understanding it:

> hope no one ever reads this  
>  time too long  
>  mountain is short

“What does that even mean?” Arthur says. “Mountain is short?”

“Maybe it's some kind of code for how you can find him,” Ariadne muses. 

“We looked all over the damn mountain,” Arthur protests. “There’s no entrance. There’s no ‘speak friend and enter’ thing happening. We looked!”

“He could mean he’s spent too long in the city but he’s hoping the time will go by faster outside of it,” Eames remarks. “He probably thinks waiting it out on the mountain is faster than waiting it out in the remnants of the city he and Mal built.”

“He’s not on the mountain anymore, Eames,” Arthur gripes.

“But didn’t you get the sensation he _was_ watching us?” Eames asks. 

Arthur doesn’t answer, though he feels down to his bones that Eames is right; Cobb is somewhere on that mountain. They just couldn’t see him, for all they had looked.

Saito enters with his arm slung around Robert’s shoulder. “Good news!” he says. “I’ve talked Robert out of taking over his father’s empire. Provided, of course, he still remembers any of this two centuries from now.”

“Excellent,” says Yusuf. “I’m still getting Cobb’s share of the fee.”

 

 

Two mountain flyovers later, there's still no sign of Cobb, but they haven't seen any more shitty weather, so they're thinking that's a sign that wherever Cobb is, he's not swimming in a sea of loneliness and guilt. Arthur even finds a newly blooming daisy on the ledge near the hollow tree.

“Charming,” says Eames, who promptly plucks it and tucks it into Arthur’s lapel. 

“That’s the first living thing we've seen on this rock and you just slaughtered it,” Arthur complains. 

Eames says, “Still limbo, though, yeah?” and Arthur doesn't really have anything to say after that. 

Yusuf’s watches are ready in a few more days—at least they think they’re a few more days, given that the sun hasn’t been moving—and he passes them around proudly. They're large steampunkish monstrosities with bulging brass fobs and huge faceplates. “They're all synchronized,” he explains. “I've timed the second hand to advance very rapidly to correspond to the time dilation factor. In order to speed up our time-frame down here, we need to translate those seconds into minutes, and the minutes into hours and so forth. If we can do that, we should decrease the time we spend down here from 164 years to around 18 months.”

“How do we do that?” Arthur asks.

Yusuf grimaces. “Concentrate really hard?”

“How will we know if it's working?” 

“We should be able to track the sun,” Eames suggests.

“It’s just been sitting there not moving for like a week!” Robert says with a scowl. “Now you want us to just crank it back up again?”

“I had to project a light-proof room to sleep in,” says Saito. “Very vampiric.”

“And how are we supposed to keep our projections from freaking out when the sun starts suddenly moving faster?” Arthur asks. “They're already getting restless because we slowed it down.”

“If we manage to speed up time how are we to keep ourselves from aging rapidly along with it?” Saito asks. 

“How do we know mentally aging ourselves rapidly won't actually be worse than letting it happen over time?”

“There's no proof that will happen, we don't know--”

“And I don't want to take the risk!”

Ariadne projects a chalkboard eraser out of nowhere and slams it against the whiteboard.

“Hey!” she shouts. The others quiet down immediately.

“This is the plan,” she says sternly. “We agreed on it already. Yusuf made us cool watches! We're doing it. If it works we'll only lose a year and a half of our lives. If it doesn't work we'll come up with something else that does. If we do nothing, we'll end up as zombified old people either way. Now let's all concentrate on these watches and start bending time, dammit!”

Despite this stirring speech, this turns out to be easier said than done. 

 

 

Three more days go by, and nothing’s changed. The sun is moving again, but it sometimes seems to hang in the sky without moving for a while, as if it’s gotten confused. They’ve taken to gathering dutifully together once a sleep cycle and attempting to visualize the increments on Yusuf’s watch slowly segueing into hours. It’s an interesting exercise, at least—the process of trying to unspool time is simultaneously laborious and boring and weird and new age-y. 

“Couldn’t we try building a TARDIS and time-jumping ahead to the end?” Eames asks after the third failed attempt.

“Good idea, but no,” Yusuf says. “We’d still have to wait out the nine hours of real-time sedation.”

“Have I thanked you for drugging us without our consent yet?” Arthur mutters. Sleeping with the sun still out has left him exhausted and moody, and he lets himself relax when Eames steps behind him and begins wordlessly massaging his shoulders. He closes his eyes and tries to unclench and enjoy Eames’ fingers rubbing slow circles over his neck. This is the most boyfriend-y thing he’s done or had done to him in—shit, years. 

Arthur wonders what it is about him that makes Eames, who Arthur has known to coldbloodedly con war widows out of their dead husbands’ military pensions, morph unfailingly into a quaint flower-offering gentleman with soft eyes and an infinite amount of patience for Arthur at his meanest. Maybe it’s all a long con, but it’s been a very long time since Arthur stopped waiting for the other shoe to fall. He thinks this may just be it. 

Eames leans in and whisks his thumb up over the curve of Arthur’s jawline to trace the tip of his ear, and Arthur shudders all over. He allows himself the luxury of dropping his head back against Eames’ shoulder, of letting Eames move in close and press himself all along Arthur’s spine. He can feel Eames’ smile warming the side of his throat. 

Yeah. This may just be it.

He’s reconsidering the practicality of going a century and a half or so without knowing what Eames’ mouth feels like engaged in various potential uses when Ariadne snaps her fingers.

“I’ve got it,” she says. “The mountain is short. The mountain is _short!_ ” 

She looks around the room triumphantly. They stare at her.

“Don’t you get it?” she says. “Cobb’s not on the mountain. Cobb _is_ the mountain.”

They keep staring. She makes a frustrated noise. “Look, we’ve had the right idea but we’ve been going about it the wrong way—sorry, Yusuf. We’ve been trying to change our concept of time, but we’re _people_. Humans have evolved to experience time collectively the same way. Cobb must have realized the only way to make time go faster was not to change his _perception_ of time but to change his _perspective_ of time.”

“So he forged himself as a mountain?” Eames asks.

“Smart idea. After all, what’s a hundred years to a mountain?” Saito asks.

“Exactly,” Ariadne says. 

“You’re the only one of us who can forge,” Arthur says. “How are the rest of us supposed to hold a forgery for that long?”

“Nah, you’d be all right,” Eames says. “Forging something inanimate is much easier than forging people, trust me.”

“But if we turn ourselves into mountains won’t that make us like a million years old?” asks Robert.

“If Ariadne’s right, Cobb’s been down here a lot longer than the rest of us, so he probably went for the oldest thing he could think of that he was able to forge,” Yusuf says. “Plus he probably thought he’d be here for a lot longer than a hundred and sixty years. Trust me, he’s terrible at math.”

“I really don’t think my mom will want me turning up to the funeral thinking I’m a mountain,” Robert says.

“So we need to learn how to forge ourselves as something that’s old, but not _too_ old,” Eames answers.

“So not a land mass,” Ariadne says. “The great wall of China?”

“Still too old.”

“Skyscrapers,” Arthur says. “Manhattan skyscrapers.”

“Shit,” says Ariadne, with sudden reverence. “We could recreate parts of New York and lay out the grid. We could model the architecture and then each hold it in our heads like we would a level of the dream, only this time we’d _be_ the dream level.”

“I could be Wall Street,” Saito says, looking pleased.

“I call dibs on the Empire State Building!” Ariadne says, already turning and scribbling furiously on the whiteboard.

Ariadne and Arthur spend a week razing Cobb’s dilapidated city and erecting what they can remember of Manhattan below 59th, while Eames teaches them all how to forge. After a few days training and dry runs as model versions of themselves, Ariadne shoots up in the middle of the city like a firecracker, the ESB’s long spire promptly lighting up green, her code for ‘all is well.’

After that, the others go in quick turns. Saito insists on waiting until morning to turn into the Stock Exchange so that the projections inside can open it with a bullhorn. Yusuf’s transformation into the Flatiron building is quiet and seamless, but Robert balks at the prospect of being Gehry New York. He had wanted to be the Statue of Liberty or the Brooklyn Bridge, but no one wants to be responsible for drowning him all over again if his forgery should happen to fail.

“I’ll be controversial,” Robert says unhappily. “I don’t want to be controversial! I should have asked to be Central Park.”

“Now, now, you’ve nothing to worry about,” says Eames, who has agreed to be the last one to transform into his building of choice in order to make sure everyone else has done it right. He gives Robert a friendly pat. “You’re shiny and new! You’re not controversial, you’re innovative! People love you! Besides, I’ll be right next door if anything goes wrong.” He gestures to the spot Ariadne has designated for the Woolworth Building, which Arthur privately thinks couldn't be more obnoxiously Eames—a tad bit gaudy, slightly anachronistic, and inexplicably beloved.

“Right,” says Robert. “Not controversial. Innovative.” And with that he transforms into a sleek ripple of steel.

Arthur and Eames take their time traveling back to midtown. Their projections have already multiplied and filled the city, opening up bodegas and forming crowds of tourists and settling in like perfect automatons. When Eames’ hand bumps against Arthur’s as they jostle their way through Union Square, Arthur takes it and links his fingers through it, and they stay that way for most of the long walk back to 42nd Street. 

“Well,” Eames says, “I suppose this is where we say goodbye.” He’s wearing a faint smile and drinking Arthur in with his stupidly deep eyes. The sun is setting over the far side of the city, getting caught in Eames’ hair and turning it a sharp bronze. Arthur realizes on some level he may be projecting more romance into this moment than is strictly necessary; still, he wonders if he’ll remember it when he wakes up—the the crinkle at the edges of Eames’ eyes, the curl of his mouth, the hard curve of his jawline. He hopes he will.

“Not quite yet,” Arthur says, and he steps in and kisses him, long and slow. Eames’ hands tighten instantly around his back. He sinks his plush mouth against Arthur’s, and Arthur holds on, dizzy with all the frustrating, exhilarating, terrifying, intoxicating things he so rarely lets himself feel when they’re together, until finally he breaks away, laughing and flushed.

“Darling,” Eames says, voice hoarse and lips swollen. Arthur puts his fingers over them and traces them for a moment.

“We have unfinished business, Mr. Eames,” he says, smiling. “Don’t keep me waiting.” 

And he turns into the goddamned Chrysler Building. 

 

 

Arthur doesn’t feel particularly older when he wakes up on the plane. Mostly he just feels really tall. He keeps getting a shock when he looks down at his shoes and finds they aren't hundreds of feet away. From the looks of it, everyone else is suffering from similar bouts of vertigo, but otherwise everyone appears to be intact. He looks over at Cobb, who's yawning and giving them all enthusiastic thumbs up. Of course, Arthur thinks. He has no idea any of them were in limbo with him at all. He wonders briefly if he should warn Cobb that Robert might wake up in a few moments and remember everything.

But he's done babysitting Cobb from now on, he reminds himself. Cobb dropped him into limbo without even a thought for their friendship. He's smart enough to turn himself into a mountain; he can deal with whatever the consequences are if Robert remembers them or the inception.

His phone buzzes in his pocket; a text from Eames.

_Didn't keep you waiting too long, did I?_

He remembers endless sweeps of tourists, long days stretching into longer nights, the city strung out like a christmas garland, people teeming like ants below him. 

He remembers Eames.

He can still feel Eames' smile at his back. He leans back in his seat and stretches his shoulders, knowing Eames will be watching.

 _No,_ he replies after another moment. _Just long enough._


End file.
